How big is Reddit? Very, very big indeed…

Well, that’s one way to answer questions about how popular your website is. Reddit dumped image captures of its traffic online last night, proving once and for all that, no matter how large you thought the site and its community was, chances are it’s actually substantially bigger.

The stats weren’t entirely complete; they came from Redditor GuitarFreak027, and covered the eight subreddits that GuitarFreak027 moderates – /r/funny, /r/pics, /r/todayilearned, /r/politics, /r/videos, /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu, /r/doesanybodyelse and /r/howto – rather than all of the subsections of the monolithic site. However, those eight include five of the site’s defaults, which new users automatically subscribe to upon signing up, and can therefore be considered a good guide to just how much traffic Reddit sees overall.

According to the stats, Reddit’s busiest subsection is /r/funny, with 6.5 million pageviews a day – 275,000 per hour – from 600,000 unique visitors, suggesting that each visitor on average views around 10 pages on that particular subreddit. That traffic isn’t consistent, though, and on its busiest day, /r/funny saw 9 million pageviews.

Behind that is /r/pics, which is the site’s second biggest subreddit but “only” gets 580,000 visitors, viewing 3.2 million pages per day on average. That’s an interesting discrepancy, with less than half the pageviews but a far closer amount of unique visitors; is it that visitors to that subreddit get what they need quicker and then leave, or that the nature of the two sections require different amounts of pagechurn?

(The number of daily subscriptions for the two subreddits is relatively close, in the region of 4,000-5,000 each day; /r/funny is almost consistently higher, but not to an important degree. /r/politics, another “default” subreddit, gets the same kind of numbers.)

Of the other subreddits listed in the infodump, /r/videos is unsurprisingly the most popular, with traffic approaching /r/pics level. The traffic for /r/politics is perhaps the most interesting, with traffic showing a couple of interesting jumps that seem unexpected until you map them against the news of that particular day; the Supreme Court’s upholding of the Affordable Care Act and an earlier report of a Midwestern US radioactivity scare both drove pageviews up dramatically during the month. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to that particular subreddit during the next few months, as the Presidential Election continues to heat up.

As would be expected for information concerning Reddit, there’s a thread on Reddit itself where GuitarFreak027 discusses the information. “Interesting to note,” they wrote as way of introduction, “at the current rate of subscriptions/day to /r/funny and /r/pics, they [will] hit 3 million subscribers by November/early December. They both hit 1 million in January [after four years of existence].” Another redditor, Apostolate, points out that the site’s growth can perhaps be explained away by following the Google Trends referencing for the site.

Of course, as should be expected with anything successful on the Internet, many are using the news of the site’s growing popularity as an excuse to declare its end. “The reddit collapse nears!” jokes Geneusutwerk, “Stock up on funny pictures of cats while you can!” Wise words, but I think we have some time before Reddit ceases to be a major player in the online world.